Blockchain Revolution

IN SEARCH OF THE TRUST PROTOCOL
As early as 1981, inventors were attempting to solve the Internet’s problems of
privacy, security, and inclusion with cryptography. No matter how they reengineered
the process, there were always leaks because third parties were involved. Paying with
credit cards over the Internet was insecure because users had to divulge too much
personal data, and the transaction fees were too high for small payments.
In 1993, a brilliant mathematician named David Chaum came up with eCash, a
digital payment system that was “a technically perfect product which made it possible
to safely and anonymously pay over the Internet. . . . It was perfectly suited to sending
electronic pennies, nickels, and dimes over the Internet.”
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It was so perfect that
Microsoft and others were interested in including eCash as a feature in their
software.
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The trouble was, online shoppers didn’t care about privacy and security
online then. Chaum’s Dutch company DigiCash went bankrupt in 1998.
Around that time, one of Chaum’s associates, Nick Szabo, wrote a short paper
entitled “The God Protocol,” a twist on Nobel laureate Leon Lederman’s phrase “the
God particle,” referring to the importance of the Higgs boson to modern physics. In
his paper, Szabo mused about the creation of a be-all end-all technology protocol, one
that designated God the trusted third party in the middle of all transactions: “All the
parties would send their inputs to God. God would reliably determine the results and
return the outputs. God being the ultimate in confessional discretion, no party would
learn anything more about the other parties’ inputs than they could learn from their
own inputs and the output.”
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His point was powerful: Doing business on the Internet
requires a leap of faith. Because the infrastructure lacks the much-needed security, we
often have little choice but to treat the middlemen as if they were deities.

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A decade later in 2008, the global financial industry crashed. Perhaps propitiously,
a pseudonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto outlined a new protocol
for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system using a cryptocurrency called bitcoin.
Cryptocurrencies (digital currencies) are different from traditional fiat currencies
because they are not created or controlled by countries. This protocol established a set
of rules—in the form of distributed computations—that ensured the integrity of the
data exchanged among these billions of devices without going through a trusted third
party. This seemingly subtle act set off a spark that has excited, terrified, or otherwise
captured the imagination of the computing world and has spread like wildfire to
businesses, governments, privacy advocates, social development activists, media
theorists, and journalists, to name a few, everywhere.
“They’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is it. This is the big breakthrough. This is the
thing we’ve been waiting for,’” said Marc Andreessen, the cocreator of the first
commercial Web browser, Netscape, and a big investor in technology ventures. “‘He
solved all the problems. Whoever he is should get the Nobel Prize—he’s a genius.’
This is the thing! This is the distributed trust network that the Internet always needed
and never had.”
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Today thoughtful people everywhere are trying to understand the implications of a
protocol that enables mere mortals to manufacture trust through clever code. This has
never happened before—trusted transactions directly between two or more parties,
authenticated by mass collaboration and powered by collective self-interests, rather
than by large corporations motivated by profit.
It may not be the Almighty, but a trustworthy global platform for our transactions
is something very big. We’re calling it the Trust Protocol.
This protocol is the foundation of a growing number of global distributed ledgers
called blockchains—of which the bitcoin blockchain is the largest. While the
technology is complicated and the word blockchain isn’t exactly sonorous, the main
idea is simple. Blockchains enable us to send money directly and safely from me to
you, without going through a bank, a credit card company, or PayPal.
Rather than the Internet of Information, it’s the Internet of Value or of Money. It’s
also a platform for everyone to know what is true—at least with regard to structured
recorded information. At its most basic, it is an open source code: anyone can
download it for free, run it, and use it to develop new tools for managing transactions
online. As such, it holds the potential for unleashing countless new applications and
as yet unrealized capabilities that have the potential to transform many things.